Introduction NCSA Established in 1985 with a National Science Foundation grant, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) opened to the national research community in January 1986. NCSA is a high-performance computing and communications facility designed to serve U.S. computational science and engineering communities. Located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), NCSA is funded by the National Science Foun- dation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, other federal agencies, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, and industrial partners. Software Development Group NCSA Mosaic is a product of the NCSA Software Development Group (SDG). SDG develops workstation software programs to assist in scientific discovery, including software for data analysis and visualization. SDG develops tools for all of the major platforms: Macintoshes, PCs, UNIX workstations, and high- end supercomputers. Most SDG tools are available on the NCSA anonymous FTP server (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu). See ÒHow to FTPÓ on pageÊBÐ1. NCSA Mosaic NCSA Mosaic software is a distributed hypermedia system designed for infor- mation discovery and retrieval over the Internet, which is a global network of networks. NCSA Mosaic provides a single interface to the variety of protocols, data formats, and information servers available throughout the Internet. NCSA Mosaic (version 2.6) includes the following features: ¥ Common Client Interface (CCI) support to allow external applications to communicate with Mosaic via TCP/IP ¥ HTML table support ¥ Kiosk mode support ¥ Nested hotlists ¥ Customized editor ÒhookÓ ¥ Default font specifications ¥ Support for transparent (GIF89) inline images ¥ Transparent and automatic uncompression of compressed or gzipÕd files ¥ Support for interactive forms as well as encrypted submission of forms ¥ For those behind firewalls: ability to pass URL access methods to a proxy gateway to simulate direct network access Notational Conventions Material in this manual is presented in text, screen displays, or command-line notation. Different typefaces indicate different functions. New concepts or terms are generally in italic type when they first occur in text to indicate that they are defined in the paragraph. Cross references within this manual usually include the title of the referenced section or chapter enclosed in quotation marks (e.g., see ÒExploring on Your OwnÓ on page 5-4). Boldface type represents characters you enter as shown (literal expressions). Lowercase italic type represents a variable, a placeholder for the text you actu- ally enter. A variable can consist of different characters each time you make the entry. Throughout this manual, you may be instructed to enter specific characters on the keyboard. These entry instructions (command lines) are printed in fixed- width boldface type (e.g., dothis) and appear either within a paragraph or on a separate line. Command lines are normally entered in lowercase. San-serif boldface type (e.g., the Cancel button) represents boxes and buttons in dialog boxes, command names on pull-down menus, menu names, and hyper- links. Keys that are labeled on your keyboard with more than one character, such as the RETURN key, are identified by all uppercase letters in fixed-width font. Keys that you are to press simultaneously or in succession are linked with a hyphen (e.g., press SHIFT-OPTION-d).